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Open Source vs. Academic Dishonesty?
Raul654 asks: "My university has a very vague Academic dishonesty policy. I have a small webpage with some code I have written (mostly C/C++ and Verilog), GPL of course. Someone warned me, rightfully so, that I might be in violation of the policy. Long story short, I have an appointment with Judicial Affairs in a few days (my doing), and I want to go in there with some persuasive arguments for why I shouldn't have to pull the page." The problem here is that the code on his webpage is code from previous programming projects. It basically boils down to the tradeoff of a student who feels pround about his work and a professor who doesn't want to interfere with the lesson plan he probably worked hard to produce. How do you feel about this?
Move your page off campus that way they can't really bitch. And if they do bitch, just say it's not yours.
Besides, Shouldn't the professor attempt to improve his/her lesson plan,instead of using the same old stale plan each year? Is it too much to ask of the professor?
And I believe that would not be a legal contract.
/. :-)
No. A legal contract has to be entered into willingly by both parties. Coercion on either side invalidates it, as I'm sure you found out.
I REALLY hope Raul's prof's read
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
University of Queensland in Australia. For some reason I think you yanks would have had the extact same thing happen over there long long long before someone bothered to contact a lawyer in .au.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I'm positive it is against the rules of the GPL to re-release source code as if it were your own. I'm fairly certain that means anyone submitting GPL'd code for a grade is in violation of the terms of use, and therefore you are not giving help during a quiz, examination, or a class exercise. You had the right to define the copyright on the code, and while the University may or may not have the right to remove that code from their webservers (see thread on ACLU and newspapers), they do not have the right to remove that code from existence.
That having been said, your professor does want to keep a solid, useful learning plan viable, and part of that is forcing students to think through the problems themselves. What are your goals WRT putting up this code? I know I have the urge to share everything too, but do the benifits of your goals outweigh the (slightly) decreased effectiveness of the class? Is there somewhere else that you could post the code that will minimize the danger to the courses, somewhere unlikely to be found by UD students?
You are going into a negotiation with the university here. You *are* in the right, and I'm sure there are at least a half-dozen undergraduate or graduate Technology Law students who would love to rally to your cause. However, the professor has a very real concern, as cheating (and therefore not learning) is far more common and difficult to discover than anyone would care to admit. Even if in the murky are of coding your work would be used as a Cliff's Note instead of a cheat sheet, that is still not teaching students how to think about the problem. Ultimately, the best arrangement may be to simply take the code down and store it away in exchange for a signed letter of appreciation from the university (as a CYA measure).
BTW, your other professor is doing his programmers a disservice by getting them used to unreasonably signing away the rights to their code. This type of activity is a plague on the entire IT industry, and has resulted in serious and unfortunate litigation from which the programmer always loses... even if it is just 20,000 in court costs.
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